indeed-scraper

Python project to scrape Indeed data and catalog it on a fully editable web dashboard

API Instructions

The API is available at: https://scraper.nextdev.in/

API documentation can be found at: https://scraper.nextdev.in/docs

Scraper Instructions

• The scrape_indeed_jobs function scrapes Indeed.com for the given search term and location using the given client cookie
• location here is a dictionary with city and state as keys
• The extra_headers kwarg has two parts:
  • The cookie is part of the request header sent to Indeed and it needs to be a live cookie, see below for instructions on how to find it
  • The user_agent is also part of the request header and it needs to match the live cookie, see below for instructions on how to find it
  • If either of the above aren't provided, default values will be used
  • Be warned however, cookie fabrication isn't on the list yet and the default user agent will probably not work
• scrape_indeed_jobs returns a list of dictionaries containing individual job entries with the company, position, salary, etc.

Finding the Indeed Cookie

• The extra_header kwarg for scrape_indeed_jobs needs to contain the cookie string with Indeed cookies from a live session
• To find yours first open the developer console and navigate to https://indeed.com/jobs
• Find the first GET request for indeed.com, in.indeed.com, etc. and copy it in cURL syntax, it'll look something like this:

curl 'https://in.indeed.com/?from=jobsearch-empty-whatwhere' --compressed -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.5' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cookie: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: document' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: none' -H 'Sec-Fetch-User: ?1' -H 'Sec-GPC: 1' -H 'TE: trailers'

• Copy the entire value for Cookie: and pass it as the cookie

Finding Your User Agent String

• The user agent string must match the session the above live cookie was obtained from
• To find it follow the above instructions exactly
• Then copy the value for User-Agent and pass it as the user_agent

Extra: Understanding the Cookie

Disclaimer: Cookie fabrication won't be possible so this section is for educational purposes only. I do not condone or promote any malicious use of this information.

• When you copy the cookie string you will see something like the following:

CTK = "XXXX"
__cf_bm = "XXXXX"
_cfuvid = "XXXXX"
CSRF = "XXXXX"
gonetap = "0"
SHARED_INDEED_CSRF_TOKEN = "XXXXX"
LC = "co=IN"
indeed_rcc = "LV"
INDEED_CSRF_TOKEN = "XXXXX"
LV = "LA=1703877527:CV=1703877527:TS=1703877527"
hpnode = "1"

• These are the cookies Indeed saves on your browser when you visit the link https://in.indeed.com/jobs. I'll go over the most important cookies that you need for the scraper to function:
  • CTK appears to be a unique hash for the user session, pretty self explanatory
  • CSRF and/or SHARED_INDEED_CSRF_TOKEN are both used to prevent cross site forgery, you can find more information here.
  • __cf_bm is the Cloudflare bot management cookie to help identify automated traffic (like what we're doing). This is possibly the primary reason for the scraper session expiring so quickly.
  • _cfuvid is the Cloudlfare unique visitor id used to rate limit sessions from the same IP address if they don't provide this token. I wouldn't recommend crawling Indeed without this.
  • LV = "LA=xyz:CV=xyz:TS=xyz" These appear to be Unix timestamps that match the time the cookie was created, they're probably used (with other tokens) to determine the lifetime of the session. As of January 2024, the session seems to have a pretty short lifespan and it might be extended by manipulating these but you don't need these for the scraper to function.
  • LC is a location code. Easy to understand.
  • hpnode and gonetap appear to be some Indeed-specific preference cookies, they're not important and aren't necessary for the scraper to function as of 2024-01-13

Legal

indeed_scraper is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

indeed_scraper is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the license for more details.